Cheat Meals and Calories
By Kim Lyons
I want to spend a little time explaining how you can enjoy what I like to call ‘cheat meals’ without sabotaging your progress. I’ll be discussing caloric deficit, caloric intake, calorie balance, caloric budget with respect to eating and losing weight.
Junk food doesn’t automatically make you fat. It’s the extra calories in these junk foods that make you gain fat. For example, many people think eating pizza or a cheeseburger or chocolate equals getting fat. It doesn’t. There’s not a cause and effect relationship where ‘junk food’ automatically turns into fat. Eating too many calories equals gaining fat and because junk food is very high in calories it often leads to fat gain, but that’s the only correlation.
We suggest that you limit these types of high calorie foods, or at least make healthier changes to them such as asking the waiter to go light on the cheese or hold the mayo and substitute a salad for fries because they’re very high calorie foods and they make creating that ‘caloric deficit’ (burning more than you eat) a challenge.
But to say that when you eat one of these foods they’ll cause you to automatically gain fat or even prevent you from losing fat, that just isn’t true! The bottom line is that depriving yourself completely of your favorite foods is a great way to make yourself miserable and certainly cause you to fall off your diet progress very quickly.
And this is the reason so many diets fail. They don’t teach you how to strike a balance. We feel that you can allow yourself your favorite foods as long as you acknowledge that calories do count and you must obey the law of ‘calorie balance’ (calories in vs. calories out) and plan accordingly to consistently create this calorie deficit.
This means that if you really want to go out and have a cheese-burger with your friends, for example, then you should follow these 4 easy steps:
1. Take account for that in the rest of your meals that day and make a conscious effort to eat a little smaller portions and/or eat foods lower in calories, such as lean complete proteins and fibrous carbohydrates (veggies).
2. Be a little more active throughout the day as well. Whether it’s an extra 10 minutes of cardio or simply playing with your kids, the more calories you burn throughout the day, the better.
3. Make some simple changes to that meal so that you can still enjoy it, but don’t go so overboard that you sabotage your progress. An example of making simple changes to a traditionally high calorie meal is as follows: ordering a burger with no cheese and mayo, having a salad instead of fries, drinking water or diet soda instead of regular soda, and asking the waiter to box up half in advance. (We have lots of ideas like this for you at Fast Track to Fat Loss)
4. Get right back on track after that meal, right away. Allowing yourself a ‘cheat meal’ doesn’t mean that you can go crazy the rest of the weekend and then just start over on Monday.
Now, because you ate a few less calories than you normally do throughout the day and were a little more active … and because you made some simple, yet wise choices to your burger meal you may have ended up eating no more calories than you normally do.
So did that burger out with friends cause you to gain fat? Absolutely not because you planned wisely in advance and made wise choices to stay within your ‘caloric budget’ for the day. If you plan ahead and follow the above simple steps, you will achieve your weight loss goals, yet still enjoy yourself in life.
Speaking of cheating, did you know that your average glass of beer, wine or cocktail has more than 200 calories? That’s just one glass! You could eat 20 large bags of spinach and not consume that many calories!
Learn more about nutrition and effective weight loss at
Fast Track to Fat Loss.
